Six teams tipped off the NBA season Tuesday night while the rest of the league, including the new-look New Orleans Pelicans, got their campaigns underway Wednesday.
The Miami Heat received their NBA Championship rings and raised another banner, two Los Angeles teams played in an arena they share and the season was underway.
And frankly, I could care less.
Of the major professional sports, basketball has the most irrelevant regular season because of the way its postseason is set up.
Sixteen of the 30 teams, eight of the 15 from each conference, make the playoffs. With more than half the teams advancing on to the postseason, the regular season gets completely devalued.
Consider the other two major sports.
Football is the gold standard. It has the best regular season because teams only play 16 games and only 12 of the 32 teams advance to the postseason.
That setup makes every game crucial because who makes it often comes down to one game and unlike the NBA, good teams get left on the outside looking in.
Baseball has the longest regular season at 162 games, but can justify it with the most exclusive postseason. Under the recently expanded system, 10 of the 30 teams reach October with four of them having to win a play-in Wild Card game as a penalty for not winning the division.
Making the playoffs in the NFL or MLB is an accomplishment. But in the NBA, there is no exclusivity to reaching the postseason as only the bottom-feeders are left out of the party.
In seven of the last eight seasons, a team at .500 or worse has made the playoffs. That devalues the accomplishment of better teams and makes it impossible to get fired up about the beginning of a long trudge that ultimately doesn’t decide much.
Under that system, the regular season is something of a formality and everything is decided in the gigantic postseason tournament.
That’s fine. College basketball does it the same way, but there is no reason for the regular season to be so long.
The 82-game schedule drags out over a six-month period. For perspective, the playoffs don’t begin until a little before spring semester final exam week. That is entirely too long for a regular season that eliminates less than half of the teams.
The answer is to shorten the season, both in terms of playing less games and starting it later.
Despite being the product of a work stoppage, the 2011-12 schedule should be used as the model.
Due to the lockout that year, the NBA was forced to play a condensed 66 game slate that didn’t begin until Christmas Day. Playing fewer games made the games more significant, but pushing back the start of the season is the more crucial change.
Ideally a season starts off with a bang. We’re currently in the middle of the World Series and coming down the stretch of the college and professional football seasons, meaning the NBA season beginning is nothing more than an afterthought for most Americans.
Starting the season on Christmas would make it a bigger deal. Tip-off would have nothing to compete against except non-BCS bowl games. Every seven years it would have to go against an NFL Sunday, but that is better than beginning the season on a random Tuesday night with nobody watching — like this season.
NBA basketball only becomes a big deal once baseball and football wrap up their seasons. And even then, the regular season is irrelevant because every halfway decent team makes the postseason anyway.
Wake me up when the playoffs start.